Frankenstein Questions
                 Parable of the Ship’s Master
                            A d v e r t i s e m e n t
    If the readers of Frankenstein have not exercised enough mental
and moral muscle to enable them to see the inconsistencies and that
rescue of the Creature is possible, it is not because Mary Shelley failed
to provide sufficient motivation or means. Dissatisfaction readers experience
at the conclusion of the novel is anticipated by the author’s preface,
which points to “moral tendencies” as the cause of the horror.   “Why
would ‘moral tendencies’ expressed in sentiments or characters cause
distress?” readers might ask. Shelley understood that many readers
would assume the words “moral tendencies” really meant “immoral
tendencies”. To show that she meant exactly what she wrote, the
first story in Frankenstein is about moral tendency that outruns
reason, causing considerable distress and requiring considerable
effort to remedy. The parable of the ship’s master is included at
page 146.  [text of parable]
    The observation that well-meaning people, following
their moral tendencies, do act destructively at times did
not first appear in Godwin’s Political Justice.  Cicero’s
De Officis mentions a book called The Destruction of
Human Life, which made the same observation two
thousand years before Godwin’s Political Justice. The
Hebrew and Greek Bibles include examples of  and
declarations of  this fact of life, as later advertisements
will show.
     At this point, it is important to call the reader’s attention to
another of the boundaries drawn in the preface to Frankenstein.
There Shelley says that no inference is justly to be drawn from the
book as prejudicing any philosophical doctrine of whatever kind.
Godwin’s observation, that moral tendencies need to be guided by
the principled use of knowledge already acquired, qualifies as such
a philosophical doctrine. When readers assume that only immoral
tendencies produce harmful effects, they violate this most important
boundary and, in doing so, shut off the way to the exhibition of the
excellence of universal virtue, which the author declares to be her
chief concern. The excellence of universal virtue is to be expressed
by the reader.
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                    To a Candid World, Copyright 1998, Thomas Wolfsehr publisher